We just saw the confirmation that both Horizon Forbidden West, Spiderman Miles Morales and Sackboy Adventures will come for PS4, these games were not considered even something of a next gen leap when people saw (except perhaps for Horizon).
Let's face the truth, the leap ever since the seventh to the current generation has been smaller, we got crossgen games that doesn't shown any extreme difference to make it inviable on the older hardware, let's have a look:
Assassins Creed Black Flag, lower resolution and textures, barely any difference in polycount, and in fact, it runs at uncapped frame rate (it could run up to 60 FPS on XOX before an update).
Call of Duty Ghosts, barely anything except for higher resolution and slightly better textures and some models.
Metal Gear 5, a game released at the brink of the end of the overtime of the previous generation, last big multiplatform title for them: Same polycount, lower textures and resolution and 30 FPS.
Now for games with bigger difference:
Battlefield 4, the entire game structure is there but with 30 FPS, worse textures, res and LOD.
Rise of The Tomb Raider, another edge at overtime, final big X360 release, lower polycount, textures and resolution, entire structure is intact.
Now, here's my controversial take:
Everybody wants the top of the top hardware, but reality kicks in and there's no pocket for everyone on that, so this is where the low and mid end market comes in.
And here's where it comes into an important regard, optmization.
We saw impressive things being made on every console generation, including this one, but suddenly Series S as an low end alternative is a problem, when everyone has been marketing 4K 60-120 FPS, resolution alone consumes a big piece of performance, any PC gamer knows that: going from 1800-2160p to 1080p (which I believe is more likely) will bring a huge performance increase, not to mention that halvening the FPS to 30 is an extra thing.
We are seing things like this:
Not to mention to even smaller projects having performance issues like hell, like Wasteland 3 and other Unity games. Meanwhile we got one of the most impressive and solid performance results in a bloody PS2
And a bloody Xbox
And a bloody Gamecube
And these games look even better when seeing for yourself in a TV, due to the use of not so good capture cards and cables.
It's easy to want a top end hardware, because you don't need to optimize and deliver games with serious issues rather than making an effort with the industry to make optimization even better, so we don't get shitty optimizations and unnaceptable performance hits in non demanding visuals.
And I'm very well aware we have seen wonderful and very optimized games in this generation, but there's nothing in this newcoming one, which will adress the shitty CPU issue of the current one, to be impressive. We have a total redesigned hardware meant to have a bigger leap than this current generation and it feels like we stalled into it.
And I know that the launch crossgen titles for the Xbox 360 were pretty lackluster too just like this generation, with exception of King Kong. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter was a wholly version of its own.
Then a year later, with the release of PS3, we got this one.
Call of Duty 3, a game with the same structure, something that would have been unthinkable before, but with night and day better graphics on PS3 and Xbox 360.
What last generation got as a cross gen a year later? A pissed, shitty, badly done port of Shadow of Mordor, and to a lesser extent, Dragon Age 3, both games were bad for any standards. Even Forza Horizon 2 which ran fine on the X360 and had some DLCs had graphics considered worse than Horizon 1.
In conclusion, nothing shown so far reeks "only possible in next generation" but rather, just buffed current generation stuff. And it's easy to say that we want the top of the top hardware before the reality ensues.
Let's face the truth, the leap ever since the seventh to the current generation has been smaller, we got crossgen games that doesn't shown any extreme difference to make it inviable on the older hardware, let's have a look:
Assassins Creed Black Flag, lower resolution and textures, barely any difference in polycount, and in fact, it runs at uncapped frame rate (it could run up to 60 FPS on XOX before an update).
Call of Duty Ghosts, barely anything except for higher resolution and slightly better textures and some models.
Metal Gear 5, a game released at the brink of the end of the overtime of the previous generation, last big multiplatform title for them: Same polycount, lower textures and resolution and 30 FPS.
Now for games with bigger difference:
Battlefield 4, the entire game structure is there but with 30 FPS, worse textures, res and LOD.
Rise of The Tomb Raider, another edge at overtime, final big X360 release, lower polycount, textures and resolution, entire structure is intact.
Now, here's my controversial take:
Everybody wants the top of the top hardware, but reality kicks in and there's no pocket for everyone on that, so this is where the low and mid end market comes in.
And here's where it comes into an important regard, optmization.
We saw impressive things being made on every console generation, including this one, but suddenly Series S as an low end alternative is a problem, when everyone has been marketing 4K 60-120 FPS, resolution alone consumes a big piece of performance, any PC gamer knows that: going from 1800-2160p to 1080p (which I believe is more likely) will bring a huge performance increase, not to mention that halvening the FPS to 30 is an extra thing.
We are seing things like this:
Not to mention to even smaller projects having performance issues like hell, like Wasteland 3 and other Unity games. Meanwhile we got one of the most impressive and solid performance results in a bloody PS2
And a bloody Xbox
And a bloody Gamecube
And these games look even better when seeing for yourself in a TV, due to the use of not so good capture cards and cables.
It's easy to want a top end hardware, because you don't need to optimize and deliver games with serious issues rather than making an effort with the industry to make optimization even better, so we don't get shitty optimizations and unnaceptable performance hits in non demanding visuals.
And I'm very well aware we have seen wonderful and very optimized games in this generation, but there's nothing in this newcoming one, which will adress the shitty CPU issue of the current one, to be impressive. We have a total redesigned hardware meant to have a bigger leap than this current generation and it feels like we stalled into it.
And I know that the launch crossgen titles for the Xbox 360 were pretty lackluster too just like this generation, with exception of King Kong. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter was a wholly version of its own.
Then a year later, with the release of PS3, we got this one.
Call of Duty 3, a game with the same structure, something that would have been unthinkable before, but with night and day better graphics on PS3 and Xbox 360.
What last generation got as a cross gen a year later? A pissed, shitty, badly done port of Shadow of Mordor, and to a lesser extent, Dragon Age 3, both games were bad for any standards. Even Forza Horizon 2 which ran fine on the X360 and had some DLCs had graphics considered worse than Horizon 1.
In conclusion, nothing shown so far reeks "only possible in next generation" but rather, just buffed current generation stuff. And it's easy to say that we want the top of the top hardware before the reality ensues.
